Happiness Research From Economic Perspective In China

The history of happiness research can be described as of long standing and well established. Ancient philosophers and ethicist pay great attention to happiness thoughts, and had an in-depth exploration on the concept and intension of happiness. Consanguineous relation between economics and ethics made early economics inherit the value judgments tradition. So, early economics conducted research for the mission of promoting human’s happiness. After efforts of several generations of economists, they have yielded some research fruits. With further development of economics, economics began to study utility and preference, and gradually pay too much attention to achieve wealth and income growth, ignoring the study of happiness itself. Fortunately, economists did not go all the way on the road of "economic growth comes first". In1958, The concept of "quality of life" was propounded by American economist John Kenneth Galbraith, so economists’began to study quality of life. Subsequently, in1974, another American economist Easterlin found "happiness paradox" phenomenon. The concept of" quality of life" and "happiness paradox" has aroused a renewed focus of economists on happiness research. From that moment, modern happiness research began to develop rapidly.Scholars of ancient China also had many viewpoints on happiness, but modern happiness research in economics began in the1980s, and so far, it only has a short history of30years. Because of short history, research objects, methods and content of this field is still in exploratory stage. For a new emerging area of research, summative research is particularly meaningful. From the summary of the research, we can know development Vein, current situation, and existing problems in the field, and define the direction for future development. For this objective, this article collates and analyzes research fruits of happiness in the field of economics.Happiness has different expression, and different scholars’use different expression to study happiness, all of the research fruits of different expression belong to scope of happiness research. Such as happiness,quality of life, life satisfaction, well-being, happiness index are often used by domestic scholars. This article searched relevant books and papers of happiness research from1981to now, using quality of life, life satisfaction, happiness as title, and using some library web sites like Dangdang and the library catalog inquiry system of East China Normal University, as well as in CNKI as Search Platform. In the process of collecting literature, we exclude happiness research fruits in medical science, so most of research fruits are in the field of economics, sociology and psychology.This article analyzes the collected literature as a whole and as three parts including quality of life, life satisfaction and happiness. We summarizes the development of happiness research, and clarifies the similarities and differences in study objects, research methods and main content among economics, sociology and psychology. Through the analysis of the literature, we can see that, happiness research in economics has three main content: Firstly, to build a happiness index system; Secondly, to evaluate happiness level of Chinese residents using the happiness index system, and analyze impact factors of residents’happiness from the overall; Thirdly, to analyze the impact of single factor on well-being of residents. This article divides into three chapters (Chapter4, Chapter5, Chapter6)to introduce research fruits belong to three main content of happiness research in the field of economics.Chapter4is divided into two parts:in the first part, happiness indicator systems are introduced including quality of life indicator system and the happiness Index System, and then calculation methods of happiness composite index are introduced; in second part, metric methods often used in happiness research of economics are introduced. Chapter5summaries research fruits measuring our residents’ happiness level from national, provincial and individual perspectives based on the happiness indicator system. In chapter6, research fruits about correlation between single factor(income, unemployment, inflation, government spending, urbanization, and environment, social capital and social demonstration) and residents’ happiness are summarized.On the basis of summing up happiness research fruits in the field of economics, this article conducted an empirical study on correlation between happiness and three type of factors, including socio-demographic factors, satisfaction factors and income factors using Ordered Logit Regression. Empirical studies have shown that:(1) some socio-demographic factors, including gender, education, and working conditions,have significant impact on happiness. Specifically, the well-being of women in our country is higher than that of male; with higher level of education, people tend to report higher happiness; those people who choose not to participate in work are more happier than those people who have work.(2) seven satisfaction factors including family economic conditions satisfaction and so on have significant effect on well-being of residents. Family economic status satisfaction has the greatest impact on the overall happiness level, followed by family relationship satisfaction, housing satisfaction, personal health satisfaction, interpersonal satisfaction and community satisfaction, job satisfaction has only very weak effect on overall happiness level. Using Ordered Logit Regression, this article studies impact of absolute income and relative income on happiness. Regression results show that:Without considering the impact of relative income, no matter we use personal annual income or household annual income to measure absolute income, absolute income has a significant positive effect on happiness. When considering the effect of relative income, effect of absolute income on residents’happiness will weaken, but the influence is still significant; Whether we measure relative income using individual’s own evaluation on their income, or using region’s average income as a reference income to measure relative income, the impact of relative income on happiness are large.(4) For all residents investigated, income gap has a significant negative effect on their happiness. However, when the residents are divided into urban and rural samples, we find that:for urban residents, income gap significantly affect their happiness level, the greater the income gap, the lower the happiness level of residents. For rural residents, although the relationship between income gap and their well-being was also negative, this relationship is not significant in statistical sense.